ORES (/ɔɹz/)[1] is a web service and API that provides machine learningas a service for Wikimedia projects maintained by the Scoring Platform team. The system is designed to help automate critical wiki-work – for example, vandalism detection and removal. Currently, the two general types of scores that ORES generates are in the context of “edit quality” and “article quality.”

Contents

Edit quality

ORES edit quality flow. A descriptive diagram of edits flowing from "The Internet" to Wikipedia depicts the "unknown" quality of edits before ORES and the "good", "needs review", "damaging" labeling that is possible after ORES is made available.

One of the most critical concerns about Wikimedia's open projects is the review of potentially damaging contributions ("edits"). There's also the need to identify good-faith contributors (who may be inadvertently causing damage) and offer them support. These models are intended to make the work of filtering through the Special:RecentChanges feed easier. We offer two levels of support for edit quality prediction models: basic and advanced.

Базовая поддержка

Assuming that most damaging edits will be reverted and edits that are not damaging will not be reverted, we can build using the history of edits (and reverted edits) from a wiki. This model is easy to set up, but it suffers from the problem that many edits are reverted for reasons other than damage and vandalism. To help that, we create a model based on bad words.

reverted – predicts whether an edit will eventually be reverted

Усиленная поддержка

Rather than assuming, we can ask editors to train ORES which edits are in-fact damaging and which edits look like they were saved in goodfaith. This requires additional work on the part of volunteers in the community, but it affords a more accurate and nuanced prediction with regards to the quality of an edit. Many tools will only function when advanced support is available for a target wiki.

damaging – predicts whether or not an edit causes damage

goodfaith – predicts whether an edit was saved in good-faith

Article quality

English Wikipedia assessment table. A screenshot of the English Wikipedia assessment table (as at Dec 2014) generated by WP 1.0 bot is presented.

The quality of Wikipedia articles is a core concern for Wikipedians. New pages must be reviewed and curated to ensure that spam, vandalism, and attack articles do not remain in the wiki. For articles that survive the initial curation, some of the Wikipedians periodically evaluate the quality of articles, but this is highly labor intensive and the assessments are often out of date.

Curation support

The faster that seriously problematic types of draft articles are removed, the better. Curating new page creations can be a lot of work. Like the problem of counter-vandalism in edits, machine predictions can help curators focus on the most problematic new pages first. Based on comments left by admins when they delete pages (see the logging table), we can train a model to predict which pages will need quick deletion. See en:WP:CSD for a list of quick deletion reasons for English Wikipedia. For the English model, we used G3 "vandalism", G10 "attack", and G11 "spam".

draftquality – predicts if the article will need to be speedy deleted (spam, vandalism, attack, or OK)

Assessment scale support

For articles that survive the initial curation, some of the large Wikipedias periodically evaluate the quality of articles using a scale that roughly corresponds to the English Wikipedia 1.0 assessment rating scale ("articlequality"). Having these assessments is very useful because it helps us gauge our progress and identify missed opportunities (e.g., popular articles that are low quality). However, keeping these assessments up to date is challenging, so coverage is inconsistent. This is where the articlequality machine learning model comes in handy. By training a model to replicate the article quality assessments that humans perform, we can automatically assess every article and every revision with a computer. This model has been used to help WikiProjects triage re-assessment work and to explore the editing dynamics that lead to article quality improvements.

The articlequality model bases its predictions on structural characteristics of the article. E.g. How many sections are there? Is there an infobox? How many references? And do the references use a {{cite}} template? The articlequality model doesn't evaluate the quality of the writing or whether or not there's a tone problem (e.g. a point of view being pushed). However, many of the structural characteristics of articles seem to correlate strongly with good writing and tone, so the models work very well in practice.

articlequality – predicts the (Wikipedia 1.0-like) assessment class of an article or draft

Support table

The following table reports the status of ORES support by wiki and model available. If you don't see your wiki listed, or support for the model you'd like to use, you can request support.

API usage

ORES offers a Restful API service for dynamically retrieving scoring information about revisions. See https://ores.wikimedia.org for more information on how to use the API.

If you're querying the service about a large number of revisions, it's recommended to batch 50 revisions in each request as described below. It's acceptable to use up to 4 parallel requests. For even larger number of queries, you can run ORES locally